Key Issues for Veterans in the Criminal Justice System

What is Combined Arms Representation?

In 2013, Fenwick & West LLP and the Microsoft Corporation jointly sponsored an Equal Justice Works Fellow at Northwest Justice Project. The result is the Combined Arms Representation Project, an effort to build upon Northwest Justice Project's existing work for low-income veterans in Washington and bring new focus and civil legal capacity for Washington veterans who become criminal justice-involved and the institutions that serve them.

"Combined Arms" is an Army doctrinal term that describes how deploying diverse forces in thoughtful combinations amplifies their unified effects and mitigates their individual limitations. The Veterans Combined Arms Representation Project creates, enables, and sustains in Washington an improved capacity to combine arms and deploy complementary, civil representation for low-income, criminal justice-involved veterans. This improved capacity to coordinate responses to veterans' civil and criminal legal needs cultivates a more sophisticated appreciation for the challenges that veterans face and yields more effective and durable solutions to those challenges. Efficiently utilizing the abundance of existing federal, state, and local veterans and non-veterans benefits in complementary civil representation serves veterans by reducing recidivism and serves society by more efficiently using resources that are already enacted and funded.

The Veterans Combined Arms Representation Project accomplishes its goals by providing civil legal advice and representation for incarcerated veterans or veterans who participate in Veterans Treatment Courts, developing educational materials, and providing training and consultations for institutions and attorneys currently serving veterans.

Why Criminal Justice-Involved Veterans?

Veterans experience increasing rates of PTSD (11%-20%), traumatic brain injury (20%), and other wounds as deployments increase in quantity, duration and frequency. Under the burden of their experiences and injuries, many veterans face depression, homelessness, suicide, or substance abuse. These veterans struggle to rejoin civilian society, and criminal justice involvement too often follows.

Criminal justice-involved veterans’ complex challenges defy conventional legal classifications and resist traditional sanctions. Meanwhile, governments at national, state, and local levels have enacted dozens of benefits and programs that could address the civil legal and non-legal issues contributing to veterans’ criminal justice involvement, but veterans have trouble accessing those benefits without help. As a result, too many veterans succumb to repeated criminal justice involvement because too few veterans can access counsel that would address underlying issues through the full range of available civil legal and non-legal benefits.

Washington officials estimate that 8-13% of state prisoners are veterans. Veteran involvement rates in the entire state criminal system are unknown, but national figures estimate that 9.3% of incarcerated persons are veterans and that 83% of those veterans are eligible for at least some civil veterans benefits.